460 WOODY PLANTS OF MASSACHUSETTS. 
Tae Common Locust Tres. RR. pseudacdcia. L. 
Figured in Audubon’s Birds, II, Plate 104. Figured by Michaux, Plate 76. 
Three varieties of the tree figured in Loudon’s Arboretum, V, 71. 
The locust, in Massachusetts, is never of a first rate size or 
height, but is often a graceful and always an extremely pictu- 
resque tree. The trunk rises sometimes directly upwards to a 
considerable height without branches, sometimes inclined to one 
side, and very irregular and bare, sometimes, on the edge of a 
wood, feathering down to the ground on one side. The bark is 
thick, and, on old trees, very deeply and irregularly furrowed 
with long furrows, and of an ashen or granite color. On the 
branches it is ash gray, and on the slender, wand-like spray, 
purple or purplish green. The soft and velvety foliage is too 
smooth to retain the dust, and is often seen, bright and clean, on 
the side of a dusty road. While the heart of the tree is so lable 
to the attack of insects, that several trees are not often seen 
together which do not present a dead or dying limb, the Icaves 
seem peculiarly exempt, and often show like an image of the 
freshness and vigor of youth, in coutrast with the melancholy 
one of premature decay. 
Flowers very fragrant and beautiful, in long pendulous ra- 
cemes from the axil of the upper leaves. The partial flower- 
stalks half an inch long. Calyx an irregular, purplish tube, 
ending in 2 obtuse and 3 acute segments. Corolla white, but- 
terfly-shaped. The lower petal nearly round, notched at the 
end and reflected, yellow in the middle. Side petals oblong, 
irregular, on a long claw, meeting below the kecl, which is 
formed of 2 petals grown together and embracing the stamens; 
these united, form a tube, in the middle of which is the curved 
style, with its capitate stigma. 
The leaves are compound, the leaf-stalk channelled above, 
and angled beneath. ‘The leaflets are from 9 to 25, on short 
petioles, oblong, elliptic or egg-shaped, rounded at the extremity, 
with a short point, smooth or silken-downy, ght green above, 
lighter beneath. At the foot of each is a single, minute, linear 
stipule, about as long as the partial footstalk. Each leaf is 
folded on itself before opening, and the half-expanded leaflets 
